


Gift Exchange

by Storycat9



Series: Wide Binary Orbit [1]
Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Clueless Lucifer, Episode: s04e06 Orgy Pants to Work, Episode: s04e07 Devil Is as Devil Does, Eve's Just Generally Curious About Everything, F/F, F/M, No beta when you write at 2 a.m., Potentially Bi-Curious Chloe, Season 4 Episode 6
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-11
Updated: 2020-10-07
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:07:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26402404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Storycat9/pseuds/Storycat9
Summary: Chloe strides into Lucifer's penthouse, dragging the sex doll under one arm and nearly vibrating with fury. She comes up short when she sees his new girlfriend sitting on the scanner of a new office copier in a very short dress."I wasn’t sure what else to do with it, y’know?” the First Woman says.ORLucifer mixes up his apology gifts. His girlfriend and his partner agree that this was a Very Dumb Idea.
Relationships: Chloe Decker & Eve, Chloe Decker/Eve, Chloe Decker/Lucifer Morningstar, Eve/Lucifer Morningstar (Lucifer TV)
Series: Wide Binary Orbit [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1979053
Comments: 27
Kudos: 139





	1. Chapter 1

Chloe strides out of the elevator into Lucifer’s penthouse almost vibrating with fury, one oversized, over-the-top sex doll tucked under one arm and dragging on the ground behind her. 

“Lucifer, what the hell kind of apology--” 

She trails off awkwardly, staring at Eve, First Woman and Lucifer’s new girlfriend. 

The beautiful brunette is perched in a deceptively innocent-looking white eyelet sundress on the scan screen of a giant full-color office copier plugged in smack dab in front of the bar. Chloe can see just enough of the pages being printed to know not to look any closer. Eve looks as friendly and game as the first time Chloe met her, but also a little wistful. She kicks her bare feet back and forth against the copier as it prints.

Eve looks up at Chloe. “Hey. I wasn’t sure what else to do with it, y’know?” the first woman says. “Maybe a secretary scene …”

Chloe looks at the printer, then at Eve. Eve’s huge dark eyes flick down to the sex doll in Chloe’s arms and back up to her. A bone-deep sigh goes through both of them.

“Yours, I think,” Chloe says, stepping forward to hold out the limp doll and its cheerfully obscene card.

Eve slides down from the copier and smooths her dress before lifting the doll like a sleeping, long-limbed child-- _She looks like a party girl, but she’s a mother too_ , Chloe thinks suddenly and then, _oh god, I shot her son_ \--and sets it gently against the leather couch. 

Eve collects a stack of pages from the copier as neatly as any CEO’s secretary, taps them together, sets them on the bar behind the printer. Then she goes behind the bar and pulls up the lid of a trash bin, delicately pulling out a dozen or so slightly crumpled printer sheets. She smooths them against the bar and taps them into a stack too, flushing a little as she pushes a slightly sweaty strand of curly hair out of her face. She picks up a cleaning rag from the bar top as she comes back around and wipes off the copier’s scanner before closing the lid.

A corner of Eve’s mouth quirks into a smile as she hands Chloe the stack of paper. “This is probably yours. Sorry I didn’t take as good of care of it as you did mine.”

Chloe thumbs through the slightly rum-smelling pages, lettered in huge font, “Apologies Detective, I won’t let you down again ever,”--with several more gratuitous “evers” thrown in.

She snorts. “You know, I think you did exactly what you should have done with it,” Chloe says, before ripping the whole sheaf in half at once and returning it to the trash. “I’d just throw it around his apartment, but I’m pretty sure you’d end up the one to have to clean it up,” she adds.

And suddenly Eve giggles, that soft, girlishly open giggle that makes it so damn hard to hate her, and Chloe finds herself smirking too. “You wanna drink?” Eve asks.

“You know, yeah, I would.”

“C’mon. You can have one of my brownies too, if you want.”

* * *

“So, what’d he do to you?” Eve asks. “To, you know, need to get you a printer.”

Chloe’s nursing her third drink and Eve has downed her fifth. Lucifer has texted each of them two or three times, with something vague and useless, not sweet enough to dim either woman’s ire, not personal enough to prevent either of them from tilting the message to the other with an eye roll. 

“He showed up at a murder scene in assless slacks,” Chloe answers. “Apparently he got them confused with his regular Armani--unless he actually has orgy pants from Armani? I guess I wouldn’t put it past him ...”

Eve’s doe eyes go somehow even wider than usual as she gasps, and then she crumples over on the couch in belly laughs so hard they make her clutch her side. The absurdity of the situation, which only infuriated Chloe at the crime scene, strikes her suddenly and she starts to laugh too. She laughs until she’s almost wheezing, clinging to the sofa, and just as Eve starts to pull herself under control she gasps out, “He p-patched over it with cr-crime scene tape!”

And that starts them both off again.

They mirror each other on the couch, facing each other sideways, one leg tucked under the other. Chloe’s head rests against her left arm, stretched out along the back of the couch while her other hand cradles an amaretto sour in her lap. She’s tipsier, for all Eve’s had more to drink; Eve makes nearly as good a cocktail as Maze does, having had the same teacher, and she’s been cheerfully practicing on Chloe.

They’re both feeling a little like they are getting away with something, stealing a moment of friendship they can’t otherwise have. They’re both Tribe, but only by dint of being friends with all the other members of the Tribe. And they’re each awkwardly thankful to the other for doing her part to ground Lucifer Morningstar’s barely contained craziness. But he holds them all together in perfect, miserable orbit, unable to get closer or pull away cleanly. He did set the stars and galaxies alight and spinning, after all, and while Dr. Linda thinks Lucifer is pulling himself apart between their gravities, at times like these Chloe and Eve can’t help but think he’s the singularity slowly consuming them.

And had Lucifer not been so utterly between them? Eve imagines hiking and camping with Chloe and Trixie, letting new friends show her all the wilds of a New World, pointing out what herbs and flowers she remembers to eat or heal, sharing a woman’s wisdom in a way she’ll never be able to in the endless pounding music and sex of Lux, as much as she loves that, too. Chloe thinks of going with Eve to the beach, of trying to learn from this endlessly sunny, hopeful woman how to keep the years and corruption of the world from grinding down everything she is.

“Thanks for all this,” Chloe says, gesturing with her drink to the general air between them. “I’m sorry I haven’t really known how to act around you. I don’t know how much Lucifer told you about what happened before you got here, but we were … best friends, partners. I didn’t take finding out about him like you did. I reacted really badly … hurt him really badly.” 

She looks down into her drink. “I’m not sure I’ll ever make it up to him, but I’m glad he has you. You are a lot more understanding than I knew how to be, and you … fit … in his life. … And you sympathize with me when he’s being a _total jackass_.”

They both smirk at each other at that last bit, but Eve’s smile falls quiet and serious. She came to Earth again to feel young, but all at once she feels the weight of all her years of marriage and family, of her own affair and her husband’s fitful memory of Lilith, of all the ways she’s watched people come together through the ages. Lucifer’s partner, his _Detective_ has no artifice, no skill to even flirt beyond stating the simple truth of her heart, and no more ability to guard herself from Eve as a romantic rival than she'd had when Eve’s son had wanted to use her heart like a magic charm to become mortal again. Chloe’s vulnerable, and strong with it.

Eve reaches her right hand along the back of the sofa and laces her fingers together with Chloe’s. She pulls, slow and relentless, drawing the blond woman forward by the hand until she can reach out to cup Chloe’s cheek with her left palm and kiss her.

It opens, deepens, slow and languid and secretive, the opposite of the cheerful passion Eve gave to calm Ella down when she was high and hyper. A kiss of apology that they don’t live as sister-wives a hundred hundred generations ago and neither one of them can share worth a damn--not Lucifer, not like this--and no matter how they try to hold onto kindness and friendship, it will unravel around them by the end. A kiss to spite Lucifer for putting them both in this position. They both break away after a long moment, mouths swollen and wet, eyes wide. For a moment Eve allows herself the vision of seducing Lucifer's Detective, in his bed, of letting him find them wrapped around each other in sweaty exhaustion without him.

Enough, enough.

“Know what he did to me? Why he got the doll?” Eve asks, light and offhand. Chloe shakes her head, her hand touching her mouth. 

“He blew off plans with me with no warning,” she says, glad her voice stays casual. “He got a text from you about a case and just … walked out.”

Chloe swallows. Eve catches some guilty, fast-buried spark of relief in her eyes before Chloe’s face goes pale and angry at her partner again, on Eve’s behalf this time. She stands and pulls Eve to her feet, shaking off and burying everything at once. “You know, screw Lucifer. Let’s not be here whenever he decides to show up. Time for a Tribe night and come up with some kind of devious prank as revenge. Want to call Maze while I call Linda and Ella?”

Eve lets herself laugh, move forward.

And Eve looks at Chloe Decker, just as her son had months and months ago, and knows there is no way to win this game, even though Chloe doesn’t even know how to play. Eve sees her own checkmate coming 18 moves ahead, and even though Chloe doesn’t even see the moves, Eve can feel them all playing out.


	2. Message Received

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eve waits in the woods outside Julian McCaffrey’s cabin. Her high heels sink a little into the soft loam, but she feels a like a tiger, waiting to ambush prey. Lucifer waits in the dark inside for McCaffrey, but he’s promised she can help punish the bastard.   
> Her phone buzzes. Chloe.  
> Eve, have you found Lucifer yet?

Eve lounges on the balcony, idly inhaling from the apple-flavored hookah beside her. The first time her phone buzzes, she sees the unknown caller sign and lets it go to voicemail. But almost immediately on its heels a text alert pops up: 

_Hey, this is Chloe Decker. Need to talk to you ASAP re: Lucifer. Please call me back._

She has an unwanted vision of the policewoman kneeling next to her barely conscious boyfriend, her hands covered in his blood as she screams for a medic. Lucifer still somehow loses his invulnerability around the Detective, a fact that keeps Eve up more nights than she’d like. Eve redials the number with suddenly shaky hands.

“Decker,” the Detective’s voice answers, taut and harried.

“Chloe? This is Eve. Is Lucifer hurt?”

“I don’t think he’s physically injured, but we just had a stakeout go totally FUBAR and now Lucifer’s disappeared. … I’m worried he’s going to do something stupid.”

Eve takes a breath. “What happened?”

Chloe rapidly sketches out the stakeout, realizing they were in the middle of a human trafficking situation and calling for backup, the suspected murderous ringleader escaping while a rookie officer died in Lucifer’s arms. “Now he’s gone and he’s not answering my calls or texts. I couldn’t get to him, but another officer said he looked ready to break down; I’m afraid he’s going to try to take out Julian McCaffrey.”

Eve releases an exasperated huff of breath. She likes Chloe, really she does, but times like this remind her of why other mortal women just can’t operate on Lucifer’s level; even knowing who he is, the police detective keeps trying to force the King of Hell into narrow human morality. 

“Detective Decker--Chloe--I really think he'll be fine going after this guy, even if it's on his own,” she explains gently, silently adding, _safer without you, in fact_. “And who better to punish a super bad guy than the Devil? It’s what he was made for.”

Chloe’s voice goes ragged. “No, Eve, you don’t understand. I’m afraid he’s going to do something self-destructive. I saw him after the first time he killed someone; he ripped himself up for it. He tried to get a sniper to kill him. He’s so upset right now he could lose control, but if he does something to McCaffrey, it’s going to hurt Lucifer worse.” Eve can hear the woman’s harsh pants on the other end of the line as she fights for control. “Please, if you can find him, just try to talk him down.”

Eve mumbles something in reply and clicks off with the Detective, her mind spinning. The _first time_ he killed someone? That can’t be right. She remembers the power and fury in the fallen angel who came to her in the Garden, the mantle of Kingship that wrapped around him. In the millennia since, it is impossible to believe he never killed anyone before this trip to Earth. Chloe must be mistaken, just one more sign she doesn’t know him. 

* * *

Eve goes down to look for Lucifer in Lux, only for Patrick to tell her that she must have barely missed him going up the elevator after she came out. When she gets back up, she has to privately admit that the Detective was right; there’s a look in his eyes like he’s gotten a bad hit of acid and isn’t quite sure how long the trip is going to last.

“Are you ok? What happened?”

He pours himself a drink and she notices, with some tiny horror, that his pocket square is just stuffed in, as though it fell out and he couldn’t be bothered to refold it. She’s seen him covered in blood--his own and other people’s--without mussing a crease on the line of his suit.

His voice sounds similarly rumpled. “You may have been right about me. I tried to be something I wasn’t and a very bad man got away … killed again. It’s all my fault.” 

Eve keeps her voice low and soothing. “Sounds like it was the man’s fault to me. Who is this guy, anyway?”

“Murderer. Human trafficker. Destroyer of lives,” he says, voice thick. “On the loose.”

Eve remembers too well the look on the faces of slave women in the market, barely out of girlhood and already wanting to die.

“Well, we can’t let him get away with that,” she says. “He should be punished.”

“By me, you mean?” he sighs and leans back, the neck of his whisky bottle dangling precariously from one hand. “Honestly, I’m not sure I have it in me any more.”

Truly? What _is_ this? Eve thinks of her conversations with Mazikeen about how Lucifer changed after meeting Chloe--before Eve herself came back, of course--how he seemed to lose his lust for hedonistic revelry, how the Detective blunted the edge of his ruthlessness. She hadn’t realized until this moment how close Lucifer is to losing his very concept of himself. 

“That’s not true,” Eve argues fiercely. “You will always have it in you. You’re the _Devil_.”

Lucifer blinks up at her, then stands slowly as though just waking up.

“Yes,” he says, the line of his jaw firming as he looks at her. “Yes, I am.”

* * *

Eve waits in the woods outside Julian McCaffrey’s cabin. Her high heels sink a little into the soft loam, but she feels like a tiger, waiting to ambush prey. Lucifer waits in the dark inside for McCaffrey, but he’s promised she can help punish the bastard. 

Her phone buzzes. Chloe.

_Eve, have you seen Lucifer yet?_

She smiles to herself. She figures she’ll adopt Lucifer’s skill of being absolutely truthful while leaving out the pesky context.

_Hey Chloe, yes. He’s pretty shaken up, but I helped him calm down. He’s had a couple glasses of whisky and decided he just wanted to sit alone in a dark room for a while._

Chloe’s response buzzes as Eve spots the headlights of McCaffrey’s car coming up the long drive.

_Thank goodness you were there. Tell Lucifer he didn’t do anything wrong today, and he can still be a big help. We’ve found McCaffrey. We’re bringing him in and he’s welcome to come help with the interrogation tomorrow._

Eve gapes. What? She eyes the man heading up the stairs to his cabin and taps rapidly at her phone. _That’s great. You just brought him in?_

 _We’re going to get him now_ , the Detective replies. _I’ll text you as soon as he’s in custody, if you think it’s better to wait to tell Lucifer afterward._

 _Thanks, Chloe_ , Eve taps back, and tucks the phone away.

The light comes on in the cabin above, and Eve can see Lucifer confronting the monster. It doesn’t matter if the police are on their way; the Devil has time to get his due. With a massive shattering of glass, McCaffrey comes hurtling through the window and over the railing, tumbling end over end down the hill to land in a crumpled heap at her feet. A gift.

Julian McCaffrey moans and whimpers, but can’t quite drag himself up. Eve watches Lucifer stride confidently down the hill towards them. He moves like the angel of pride and wrath that he is. He rests a foot on the trembling wretch’s back and cuts his gaze up to meet Eve’s, his eyes manic, shining-dark and ... and ...

Brittle.

Furious and defiant, but shattering underneath. 

_I’m afraid he’s going to do something self-destructive._

Almost without realizing it, Eve finds herself stepping around the scuttling creep at her feet and tugging on Lucifer’s sleeve, as though she wants him to bend down for a kiss. But instead, she whispers with barely a breath against his ear, “Your Detective just told me she’s on her way to pick him up. She wants you to go question him tomorrow.”

Lucifer startles, as though she had clapped hands in his face to wake him up. He shakes his head a little and frowns down at McCaffrey. She watches muscles tense and relax in his arms and the line of his jaw. She steps back as Lucifer crouches down, strokes McCaffrey’s hair with terrifying delicacy before twisting his fingers into it and forcing McCaffrey’s head up.

“Well, my little human stain,” he purrs, “the police are on their way to pick you up again. You were quite adamant you did not want to be arrested before, so you have a choice to make. Would you rather stay here, surrender and confess everything you’ve done, or come along with me? I’d be happy to take you now.”

The man frantically babbles assurances, sobbing ad begging to be allowed to confess.

Lucifer smiles like a knife. “I’ll be coming to check on you in the morning,” he whispers against the man’s cheek like a lover. “For as long as you are with the police and cooperating, you can keep your spine.”

Lucifer drops McCaffrey to the wet grass, where he curls into a shivering ball. Lucifer extends his arm to Eve like a King to Queen, a slightly remote smile curving his lips, and she takes it in the same manner, allowing him to lead her back to the corvette. 

* * *

Lucifer is riding Eve hard into the bed, his head curled down into her collarbone, when she hears the telltale vibration of Lucifer’s phone in the living room, echoed closely by her own on the bedside table. 

She moans loudly to cover the sound, and slides her nails up his back in a way that has him shuddering against her. They’ve been going at it pretty much since they got back to Lux, when Lucifer lifted her against the wall of the elevator as he pressed the button for the penthouse, grinding into her hips the whole way up as Eve tried to pour herself down his throat. She loves the heat that rises from his skin, the sheer wanton hunger in his eyes. Since the very start of the human race, she’s been dreaming of his laughing voice asking her if she wants to play, if she wants to know, and now she has all the time in the world to say _yes_ , and _more_ , and _show me everything_.

It’s not until much, much later, with sweat cooling on their naked bodies, that Eve lazily reaches for her phone. Lucifer makes a questioning noise beside her. 

“It’s from Chloe,” she answers. “They took McCaffrey to the hospital; apparently he fell in his rush to escape from the cops when he heard them coming.”

They share a grin, and she goes on. “She told me to tell you they’ll be questioning him tomorrow at Cedars-Sinai if you want to go.”

“Hmmm,” he purrs, rubbing his scruffy jaw along her belly to give her goosebumps. “I might head over … after breakfast, of course.”

Eve rolls her hips up to him with a smug look, twining her fingers through his hair. Lucifer rests his head on her belly a moment, then looks up at her with a thoughtful expression. “And were you satisfied with our little hunt, darling? I was a bit surprised you didn’t suggest I do more to punish the slug.”

She shrugs. “I know your work is important to you. I figured if the police were coming you would want to punish him with them.”

“And you knew the police were on their way,” he says; gentle, but she can feel the question and a faint hint of iron beneath.

She runs her thumb up and down her phone, sliding the message history back and forth. “Chloe texted me when she couldn’t get a hold of you,” Eve admits. “She was worried.”

She sees it pass over him, the expression of a man hearing the faint strains of a song almost forgotten, something painful but sweet and seeking to be remembered. 

Then he throws her a devil-may-care grin and the expression is gone. “Ah, well, what the Detective doesn’t know can’t hurt her.”

Lucifer rolls onto his back, tucking Eve against his side and idly running his fingers through her hair. She lets herself be soothed, lets herself drift against the warmth of his body. She wakes, but pretends not to, when he gently disengages and goes out to the balcony to drink and look up at his stars.

Eve is still not sure she did the right thing tonight. The image of Lucifer striding down the hill, full of celestial rage and punishment, had made something settle in the base of her spine: this, _this_ was the Lucifer she remembered. But that look in his eyes was wrong, was a breath away from breaking, and Eve has long experience with catching the fallout when men break themselves around her. 

Chloe had trusted her enough to reach out, and that had stopped Eve from making a mistake. She doesn’t know how to weigh that against the vulnerability the Detective brings Lucifer, or the way she can turn him with just a second-hand text. Eve doesn’t know if it’s more dangerous to push Chloe away from Lucifer, or draw her in more.

Eve and Lucifer stare into their separate darknesses, thinking of lines, and what it might mean to cross them.


	3. Sorry, Wrong Mythology

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tribe night is for drinking and sharing secrets. Chloe and Eve have more than a few.

Forget the little joke of her name, Chloe is no spring fertility Goddess. 

A cool-eyed patron of wisdom and strategy, of logic over emotion, always. She hates politics, but doesn’t mind paperwork. She’s keen to mete out justice, but vengeance runs too hot for her carefully held control. A control she still needs. By this point, she feels like the only woman--adult?--in Los Angeles who hasn't indulged in Lucifer's freely offered passion. Likely the only one for whom the offer is revoked. The Virgin Goddess wishes, just once, to lay down her shield.

If anyone, Persephone would be Eve, Chloe thinks over her second whisky sour at Lux. Eve, with her endless innocence and her fascination with the Lord of the Underworld. She catches them dancing out of the corner of her eye, because she’s absolutely not watching them while listening to Linda bemoan Charlie’s latest sleep regression. Lucifer’s regard for Eve is that of Hades for Persephone: Fond and flattered, delighting in the cheerful wantonness she brings into his dark lair. Chloe can admit Eve’s place here, her role, the season of spring madness that captures Lucifer’s attention at the time he needed it most.

And if this Persephone seems a little distracted by the Artemis of this tale, well, what's wrong with tweaking the myth a little? Lucifer, who always seems to scent desire in the air around him, blithely misses how Mazikeen’s hooded gaze now tracks his girlfriend. Or perhaps he sees it, but assumes it is the normal lust that spouts from everyone around him. He misses that his stoic huntress doesn’t just watch Eve’s breasts but her smile. He laughs when Eve showily smacks the curve of the demon’s ass for a joke, but doesn't see her later shyly trace the curve of Maze’s cheek. She thinks the two women may not even see it themselves yet; Chloe only spots it because it’s her one fragile thread of hope.

Chloe has no intention of clarifying anything she sees for them or Lucifer. There’s no love affair between Hades and Athena, and she doesn’t want to think about how her story has played out.

Besides, she and her dark-haired almost-friend have reached a  détente about the King of the Underworld . Chloe speaks up for Eve when Lucifer complains about something ridiculous, and casts no aspersions on tales of their sex life. Eve extends the courtesy of ignoring the wistful look Chloe flashes sometimes when her partner isn’t looking, and also doesn’t bring up the way her boyfriend’s body unconsciously orients toward the Detective, regardless of where she is in the room.

The two have had cautious outings with the Tribe, always a little surprised to find themselves enjoying each other’s company. When Lucifer starts off a set, Eve plops down next to Maze and strikes up a cheerfully horrifying conversation with Chloe and Linda about pre-epidural childbirth and the terrors of teething that Linda has to look forward to. The women tune out Lucifer, and after his set the Devil is wise enough not to intrude in what’s by then a full-on bitch session comparing relationship horror stories.

Linda still has nightmares in which her ex-husband Reese chases her with a bouquet of roses, begging her to take him back. Ella plots vengeance against an old boyfriend in Detroit who convinced her to set up a joint account, only to clear her out and then steal her car to skip town. 

“I mean, I really miss that car,” Ella gulps dramatically, before downing another shot and blithely asking, “How about you, Eve? Didn’t you say you were married before? What was your ex like?”

The First Woman laughs. “Well, I think Adam must’ve invented pretty much every bad husband habit. Just mooned over his perfect first wife but freaked out if I talked to a seller at the market. He used to go on and  _ on  _ about how we needed to ‘be fruitful and multiply,’ but he wasn’t doing much of the childcare for 56 kids, let me tell you. I was ready for him to get a couple of concubines by the time the second dozen came around.”

Maze snorts, bumping Eve’s shoulder, but Linda and Ella gape at her and Chloe does an outright spit-take before frantically grabbing for napkins to mop up her whisky sour. “Fifty-six?! H-How …?” she gasps.

Eve shrugs. “We lived a lot longer back then, and really, there wasn’t much else fun to do.”

Chloe dazedly tips her glass to Eve. “You get mad props for that. I’ve only got one and I feel like I barely hold it together.” The two touch drinks as Chloe adds, “and, I mean, _damn_ , how do you have 50-something kids and look like … you?”

Eve laughs. “I’ve got my old self, my best self now. I recovered pretty quickly, but I didn’t look like this after all the kids were born.” She leans toward Chloe, tipsy and earnest. “And I met your Trixie that time she came over to the Penthouse. She’s a great kid, and you are a fantastic mom.”

Chloe feels her throat tighten, and is thankful for Ella’s drunken announcement that she hasn’t followed any of that and is going to dance. Maze joins her, while Linda reluctantly decides to head home while she can still walk to an Uber. 

Eve and Chloe continue to nurse their drinks in hesitantly companionable silence until Chloe gathers courage from the remains of her whiskey sour and murmured, “I never said it, but I’m sorry for your loss. Cain did some things I can’t forgive, but he was your son.” She finds herself with the uncomfortable realization that Eve has legitimate reasons to hate her.

Eve looks down for a long moment, and when she meets Chloe’s gaze again she can finally see age in the wide doe eyes: a mother’s wisdom and grief. Eve covers Chloe’s hand with her own.

“My eldest son never understood his mark was a mercy, a chance to make up for what he had done before he died," Eve says softly. "All he had to do, in all those centuries, was care enough to put someone before himself, and his slate would be wiped clean. You gave him that chance, Chloe. I don’t blame you that he still made the same mistakes all over again.” 

With a half-smile, Eve adds, “I guess he’s why you didn’t offer a ‘bad ex’ story?”

Chloe laughs at that, brittle but real. “Oh, not alone. I think I have a sign floating over my head that says, ‘Gaslight me, please.’ Trixie’s dad threw me under the bus in front of the whole precinct when I was investigating a murder that he turned out to be mixed up in. Marcu--Cain, you know; I was engaged to a murderer of literally biblical proportions. No matter how good a detective I am, it will never make up for the fact that I had two corrupt cops in my bed and never figured it out until they rubbed my nose in it. And then Lucifer--” 

Chloe stops abruptly, her breath hitching, remembering who she’s talking to, but there’s no censure in Eve’s face. “You ... saw his devil face,” the other woman says. 

“I know ... I know it wasn’t the same, I reacted horribly, but I just felt like the only person I still trusted totally had  _ lied _ , had lied even while he was telling me the truth, because he knew I wouldn’t believe it. I couldn’t trust anything I’d known about the world, couldn’t trust even my own instincts. It was just … terrifying. I felt like every judgement I made turned out to be wrong. And so of course I just went more and more wrong from there. I felt betrayed but it was my own stupid self.” 

Eve looks at Chloe for a long time, and Chloe can see her sifting and discarding things to say. Finally, she gives her sweet, open smile and shakes her head. “Luce doesn’t think you’re stupid, and neither do I. Whatever happened between the two of you, you’re his best friend; I think he forgives you. I mean, it’s not like  _ he  _ never overreacts to anything.” 

Eve smirks and Chloe gives a wet, shaky laugh in return, then impulsively hugs her. “Thanks.”

“Hey, Tribe, right?”

“Tribe,” Chloe agrees. She pushes off from her hightop seat. “Listen, I should probably get going to relieve my babysitter …”

“Ah, screw that! Come dance with us before you go!” Eve waves down Maze and Ella, who grin and beckon them over wildly. Chloe scans the crowd quickly; not seeing him, she gives a little shrug and smiles. “I guess the sitter can wait for one more song.”

In the shadows beside the bar behind them, just far enough away to be unnoticed, a man who is never still and never quiet stands silently, thinking about what he’s heard, watching his girlfriend pull his reluctant partner to the dance floor.

The rage and hurt that have been fueling him for months seem to dissolve as he reaches for them, leaving something uncomfortably like guilt behind. It feels a little too much like the start of one of Euripedes’ darker plays. 

Lucifer idly wonders which role is his.

**Author's Note:**

> This really sparked from a story of a friend of mine who met one of her best friends when both of them realized they were being cheated on by the same guy but decided they liked each other more as friends than either of them wanted to deal with the guy. Obvs. there's a little more canon angst in the whole Chloe/Lucifer/Eve thing, but I always got the sense they would have been much better friends if neither had ever met Lucifer.


End file.
